Politics

I wrote most of this a couple of days before the election when, like most, I was pretty sure we’d be seeing a President Clinton. Obviously that’s not how things turned out. What was expected to be a time of post-election Republican-party soul-searching and regrouping has turned into the opposite, as people begin to take seriously the question of how the Democratic Party has lost the support of working class voters (a nice piece on this here). This post isn’t directly diagnostic in that regard, but it does resonate with that problem, and so I offer it as my own small contribution to thinking about what direction progressive ideas should be moving in as we figure out how to operate in Trumpworld.

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In the Bill Clinton years, as George Packer describes in a piece last month on Hillary in the New Yorker, the idea took root in the Democratic Party that being progressive meant getting people out of the working class, rather than simply making the conditions of the working class better (through better pay, safer workplaces, protection of collective bargaining rights, etc.). In other words, Democrats came to believe that the mission of social policy should be to give non-elites access to what elites have, and so in effect to transform them into elites. And they thought the primary way to do this was to educate them more. This has been the reigning ideology of the Obama administration too. College is for career; the future is one for educated workers. This is not the same as, but it resonates with, the conservative drive to purge the “liberal” from the liberal arts and see higher ed in purely careerist, job-oriented terms. The mission of the university has thus come to be very widely seen as the economic transformation of the working class.

As a professor at a regional state university, my job is basically to carry out this mission. And every day I question it.

When we think about why more sustainably raised meat costs more, we tend to focus on its higher costs of production, and sometimes also the broken meat processing system that makes it hard for small-scale farmers to get product to market (as I wrote about a few days ago). This piece from NPR/KQED’s Food Bites adds another topping to the crust. Avian flu has driven turkey costs up: “The USDA’s mid-November report on frozen tom turkeys, in the 16-24 pound range, showed that the average wholesale price was $1.35 per pound, up from last year’s $1.17.” Not enough to close the price differential with birds from all those small producers raising their organic, pastured, heritage breeds, but a step in the right direction, right? Sadly, no: “the retail price of frozen tom turkeys has fallen to an average of 87 cents a pound, compared with last year’s 93 cents.” Why? Because this time of year turkeys are loss leaders, products sold below cost in order to get consumers into the stores, where they’ll buy other stuff with a good profit margin. And turkeys are just the thin end of the wedge: “The USDA says cheaper turkeys also will put downward pressure on prices for roaster chickens and hams in coming days.” More than a little discouraging, this. We can try to level the production playing field all we want, but if national retailers aren’t even trying to break even on the animals they sell, there’s no way to get the price of good meat anywhere close to in line with that of industrial protein. Hard to know where to press for change here.

FarWriting at Civileats.com, Lauren Dixon informs us that since the Wholesome Meat Act (WMA) of 1967, the number of meat processors in the U.S. has dropped precipitously, with “with some states [now] only offering one USDA-inspected plant, and roughly half of the states in the nation completely lacking such a facility.” The sticking point here is “USDA-inspected.” Any facility that slaughters and processes animals for eventual sale to consumers, grocery stores, restaurants, etc., must, according to the WMA, meet safety and sanitation criteria set at the federal level by the USDA and be subject to regular inspection. As these criteria are generally designed for large-scale processing, and as they regularly get updated, smaller processors can’t afford to comply and so get forced out of business. The result, as Dixon says, is that now, even “[i]n a time of growing awareness about the ills of factory farming and increasing demand for local, pasture-raised meat, many small producers who might sell direct to consumers just don’t have time to drive for hours to get it processed.” The flip-side of this is, of course, a system whose benefits accrue to those operating at a large scale, as is shown by the massive consolidation in the meat-packing industry, where, according to Dixon, “just four companies produce 80 percent of the beef sold in the U.S[;] [a]nother four companies produce 60 percent of the pork, and five produce 60 percent of the poultry.” (See Christopher Leonard’s recent book The Meat Racketfor how we got to this point.)